Merry Smithmas!
by burningspirit21
Summary: Christmas is almost here... and a choir of curious carolers is at the door!


I was finally considering giving it a rest with all the decorating I'd been doing throughout the evening and putting my feet up to read for a while. It was my first Christmas season in the new place—just a few months earlier, I had moved out of my parents' house when I got a new job and settled in a nice condo. It was an alright living space, and the decorations were looking great already, but I was accustomed to being with lots of people to put lights on outside bushes, decorate the tree, and drape garland around the house. Now, it was just little old me, and after spending a whole Saturday fiddling with exterior lighting, arranging the living room furniture to accommodate a too-large fake evergreen, and trying to keep the cats from playing with various ornaments, I was just about done in.

With a contented but exhausted sigh, I flopped down onto the sofa and gazed at my Christmas tree. I reached up and switched the light off so I could admire the lights and ornaments properly. For a moment, I was pretty proud of myself: my little home looked and felt very festive, in spite of its small size and single human occupant.

Just when I had put my feet up on the edge of the coffee table, there was a knock at the door. I wondered who in the world it could possibly be—at my door, and at this hour. My parents were spending the weekend visiting my brother, and my friends all happened to be out of town, too. Maybe it was one of the neighbors needing flour for their holiday cookie baking…

My feet started hollering at me as soon as I put my weight back on them. A peek outside the front curtain did me no good at determining who my guest was; the early-evening darkness of non-daylight savings was doing a good job hiding whoever was at the door. I squished my face up against the peep-hole, irked by the cold of the door.

Several men who looked like they might be from the IRS were standing there, so I opened the door, feeling a worried expression on my face. The chill air rushed across my bare feet and I wrapped my arms around my chest.

Now I could see that there were nine of these men, and they all looked oddly familiar… and identical. I'd heard people joke that lawyers and businessmen all looked the same, but I never thought they looked quite this similar. It was as if the exact same face—which I knew I recognized from somewhere, but couldn't put a name to—was staring at me from nine slightly different positions on my front step.

They were all clad in black business suits and ties. And creepily enough, they all had sunglasses on. Their faces were pale and their hair was receding, but they were not an unattractive group. Intimidating, certainly, but I couldn't shake the notion that I had seen that face before. I furrowed my brow. Not a one of them had said a single word.

I was just about to ask the one at the front of the group standing closest to me what in Heaven's name was going on, but as soon as I opened my mouth, he opened his and started bellowing the first words of "Deck the Halls."

When he got to the end of the line, all the others joined in on the fa-la-la-la-la's in unison. I was absolutely dumbfounded.

The leader sang the second line solo again, and on the second round of fa-la-la's, the rest of them came back in, this time in a magnificent and completely unexpected nine-part harmony. They bounced between fa's and la's with joyful voices and alternating rhythms the likes of which I'd never heard before. Yet every last one of them still had the facial expression of a bored-to-death bank teller.

They went on harmonizing in chorus, and on "don we now our gay apparel," they each withdrew from apparently nowhere an assortment of fluffy Santa hats, reindeer-antler headbands, and oversized red bows that clipped onto their ties. The nine men put these uncharacteristically comedic accessories on so quickly I hardly realized what had happened, but they didn't drop a single note and somehow in the middle of it all one of them had also procured a small ring of jingle bells which he was now striking in tempo.

When I thought the carol would end, they kept right on going and sang two more iterations of verses and fa-la's which I had seldom if ever heard of the old tune. By the time they sang "follow us in merry measure" I had managed to get my cell phone out of my pocket. They continued to sing as I snapped a picture of them. I was admiring the quality of the photo—they weren't blurry at all, and my work with the camera-phone was never that good—and looked back up when the one in front tapped my arm as they sang, "hail the new, ye lovely lasses." I blushed; I was sure that lyric wasn't quite right.

They sang the last line with an impressively synchronized ritardando which startled me mostly because none of them seemed to be directing the group. It was as if they were all perfectly tuned in to one another—no choir I had ever seen was good enough to slow down so dramatically in so few measures without someone beating time for them, or at least nodding a head along.

The lot of them paused on a mutual caesura after "wind and weather." Then they went one by one through their little caroling clump, each of them taking a "fa" or "la" in turn and building a delightfully sparkling chord. As the four final la's were struck by the four final men, the five others syncopated several more chordal la's underneath. At last they all met in a lovely chord with a startling mezzo-soprano-to-baritone range among them, their lone percussionist—one of the ones in antlers—jingling his handheld bells wildly fast as they crescendoed and cut off all at precisely the same moment.

I was still so boggled and overwhelmed that I couldn't even applaud—I just stood smiling stupidly at them, wondering where on earth these people had come from.

After a brief pause, the leader asked, his voice a bizarre and startling deadpan after such a spirited display, "Would you like us to sing another?"

Nine pairs of inquisitive eyebrows shot up their nine wide foreheads in perfect coordination. If it weren't for the strangeness of their hats and bows, I might have been frightened by the almost robotic way they all seemed to move as one unit.

Still speechless, I just left my mouth gaping and gestured in a "sure, please, go ahead" kind of motion. The leader turned to the others and they exchanged brief stone-faced glances with one another. Not a syllable was spoken, but their whole nine-piece choir entered into a gorgeous rendition of "Silent Night" all at the same time.

I propped myself up against the doorframe, oblivious to the cold by that point. Their harmonization was astonishing; I had never in all my musical studies heard anything so tonally original or elegantly intricate as their nine-part polyphony.

Something was slightly off, though, and it took me several lines to figure out just what was going on. My brain finally processed that they were singing the carol in different languages. I could tell that a few of them were definitely singing in French, and I made out a few words of what I assumed to be German—yet the English lyrics I knew so well floated above in the melodic line being sung by the one who had patted my arm in the last song.

Although something seemed strange about hearing these nine men singing the words, "Jesus, Lord at Thy birth," they had nevertheless sung me into a trance. I almost teared up at their breathtakingly quiet last verse; I got goose bumps for sure when they cut off in the tenderest musical whisper I'd ever heard.

Again, I forgot to clap in my enchantment with their voices. The lead man simply gave a nod of his head and before I knew it, they had begun a rousing round of "Hark the Herald Angels Sing."

I lost track of how many verses they sang; I felt certain that after the first four or five, they started making up brand new lyrics as they went along, yet they kept perfect pace and never deviated on a single syllable. Somewhere in the middle of their song, I noticed that none of them were taking any breaths at all. I would watch one in shades and a Santa hat for a while and never see him stop to breathe, then I'd watch another in shades and a big red ribbon move from one note right into the next without any gaps.

Rather than try to figure out how they were doing it, I just dismissed it as my overactive imagination and went back to enjoying their harmonies.

When they concluded the carol, I clapped with more enthusiasm than I'd felt in years. They took a collective half-bow and removed their holiday gear. It was only then that I noticed the cats at my feet, staring curiously out at the strange men, and I wondered how long they'd been sitting there.

The leader took his sunglasses off, revealing a pair of beautiful ice-blue eyes that took my breath away. He knelt down to give a pat to each feline before him, and then rose back to his full height and stared at me. He opened his mouth to speak.

"Merry Smithmas, ma'am."

I know he must have said "Christmas," but I would swear I heard "Smithmas," and of course I didn't have a clue what that meant. The eight others chimed in at different times with echoes of "merry Christmas" and "happy holidays." All I could do was grin and gawk at them, almost more confused than I'd been upon first opening the door.

They all started to turn—apparently no longer concerned with their eerie synchronicity—and wandered down my driveway. The man in front, still meeting my eyes, smoothly replaced his sunglasses, flashed the tiniest smirk I'd ever seen, and then turned away to follow his comrades. My cats turned back into the house in a disappointed "show's over" sort of way, but I leaned against the doorframe again and stared after the strange group as they sauntered down the sidewalk towards my neighbor's place.

"Smithmas?" I mused to myself. "What in the world…"

Once more registering the freezing wind on my face, I closed the door, feeling almost sad to see the last of the funny chorus; I could have listened to them forever.


End file.
